Thorns

So, Pictures for Sad Children is a webcomic full of wry, self aware melancholy about dysfunctional people. I get linked it a lot but have always found it hit and miss.

The creator recently put up a post on his Kickstarter saying that he had been pretending to be depressed this whole time because that's just what artists do. Cue many depressed fans who had really connected with his comics feeling betrayed, and many ableist fans rejoicing at a chance to go on about how depression isn't really a thing.

But it was apparently all a joke, which anyone who was friends with him or familiar with his other work would have recognised, so all that outrage was for nothing HAHA TUMBLR. (The other, much more understandable "ARGH TUMBLR" reaction is to all the people who have been told that it's a joke but are still acting like it was meant literally, and the inevitable death treats etc. ARGH TUMBLR)

This attitude really pisses me off. I'm all in favour of satire and sarcasm (see: the title of this post, the previous paragraph), and not all humour has to be accessible to everyone. But if you tell a joke where it would be really bad if people took you literally, and most people DO take you literally, then you told the joke badly and you are responsible for the consequences.

Sure, there's only so much you can do about overly literal minded people, and it I think it's justifiable to cause SOME pain with art/humour, or we'd never get to use them at all. But having patchy reading comprehension or "not being a true fan" doesn't somehow make a person unworthy of compassion. Afaict most PFSC readers thought this was real, and a great many were deeply hurt. This could have been avoided if he made the satire more obvious, and I can't see any real advantage to being so opaque except...making the joke funnier for the people who get it? Being more effective on the tiny sliver of bigots who got the joke? Woo.

And even if we decide that everyone who doesn't get the joke is a humourless moron unworthy of respect, think of all the bigots who took it as support for hating on depressed people. Not actually being on their side doesn't magically make the pro-bigotry effect go away.

This is not someone's private blog that got taken out of context. It was a public and actively promoted kickstarter aimed at people who read PFSC, and it clearly failed at being clear to it's intended audience.

Since this apparently does need to be said: I'm not saying we should all go chasing after John Campbell with pitchforks, and the people who are harassing him need to step down. I do think he's a bit of a pretentious douche, but to be honest I kind of thought that anyway. Mainly I'm defending the people who are fans of PFSC and felt hurt from having their feelings dismissed.

Cleaning out my "ready to post" folder, I wrote this ages ago but I can see it being useful to link to at some point.

I just saw Pretty Woman for the first time. MY GOD SO CREEPY. It's one long male power fantasy of having enough money to make a pretty, sweet natured lower class girl fall in love with you, and do and be whatever you want without once having to make a commitment or say "I love you" (seriously, never. Not even at the end). Because you see she's a sex worker, so her standards are so low that not being a complete douchebag all the time is more than she would ever expect! You don't need to show her respect or care about her feelings, as long as you give her enough gifts and say the odd nice thing from time to time she will be blissfully happy.
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Homestuck is one of those canons where I often veer dramatically from "This is so awesome!" to "ARGH SO ANGRY WHY CAN'T I QUIT YOU??" and back again. Right now I just feel like venting about the latter.
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Does anyone have a link to a nice clear straightforward post which goes through point-by-point why what she said was bad? I'm having a discussion on twitter and most of what I can find is either more broad or just people bolding the relevant sections (which was enough for me, but hey) EDIT: An open Letter to Elizabeth Moon is pretty good, as are the comments in the various screncaps of the original post. EDIT: Elf has also very nobly written exactly the sort of post I was looking for.

For more see elf's linkspam.

And of course since she got disinvited from being GOH (which does not mean she's been banned from the con) people are trotting out all sorts of racist and Islamophobic crap. There's this huge assumption that "muslim" is somehow a distinct category from American and feminist and nerd. That because in their minds Islam is a sexist/violent religion overall (and I don't think it is anyway(*)) any muslim who might be interested in going to a feminist science fiction con is going to be sexist and violent too. Bah.

And now people who would never go to Wiscon and don't care about feminism are getting involved and causing more drama. If you think all feminism is overly sensitive and PC then obviously the standards expected at a feminist con are going to seem overly sensitive and PC to you. If the basic premise of the con has no value in your eyes, what is she losing by being no longer honoured by it? Bah!

(*)I suppose it's possible that if you took all the members of all the religious belief systems in the world and took a measure of their average violence/sexism then Islam would win. Or maybe atheists would win, or Chistians or Buddhists or Jains (ok, probably not Jains) Who knows! Who cares! There's nothing in Islam that forces any individual muslim to be sexist or violent, as should be obvious to anyone who's actually met any muslims.

If you like watching slashy pretty men being jerks and are fine with the erasure, dismissal, objectification and mistreatment of anyone who isn't white, straight, male, upper middle class, English, and able bodied, then this is the show for you. Well, episodes 1 and 3 are, episode 2 is just bad all round (and amazingly racist).

I...found parts of it interesting and engaging, and the slashiness is of a particular type I quite enjoy, but on the whole it wasn't as clever as I would have liked and large sections made me very annoyed. Meta: Neoliberal Holmes, or, Everything I Know About Modern Life I Learned from Sherlock gives a very damning critique, but to follow up on the portrayal of Watson's disability in particular: it is NEVER MENTIONED AGAIN. At all. Not even vaguely alluded to.

And "That's the way it was dealt with in the books" doesn't make it ok, that just means it's not inaccurate as well as ableist. If they were doing a totally 100% literal adaptation which followed every minute detail exactly as it happened in the books I might forgive them and blame Arthur Conan Doyle, but they weren't by a long shot. They chose to keep that particular flaw of the books and must bear the responsibility for that choice.

Fanworks fandom is for many women(*) a way to create a space where we can express ourselves freely and escape the oppressive sexist heteronormativity of mainstream fiction. (If that's not how it works for you, you may not get much out of this post)

There is to some extent a division between those who find their joy through m/m, and those through female protagonists. These aren't neat divisions and there's people who do neither or both (I've written male protagonist m/m, m/m/f and gen myself) but to some extent they're mutually exclusive approaches.

Sadly, the women of both groups are inclined to get into "All het is heteronormative and sexist" vs "All m/m is mysogynist and sexist" arguments, which, beyond ignoring femslash, as Hoo boy, thoughts on yaoi (let me tell you them) points out isn't helpful or accurate. That is definitely not what I'm trying to get into here.

What I'd like to express, because it's been niggling at me ever since I first encountered m/m fanfic nearly a decade ago, is the way that while m/m slash fandom clearly acts as a feminist self expression thing for it's fans, and I realise it isn't actually just an extension of the Patriarchy and it's hatred of female characters, that is how it feels to me a lot of the time. And I'm not sure what if anything can be done about it (mainly I just needed to get this out of my head).

My brain's a bit mushy today, I apologise in advance for any giant holes in my argument, feel free to poke at them though I may take a while to reply.

Also: I am not accusing m/m slashers generally of sexist intent. I mean I think some of them are being sexist, but they're no worse than anyone else on the whole imo and my m/m slashy friends are all awesome feministy people. This is about the effect of m/m fandom on me as someone outside it.
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This is a somewhat expanded version of the presentation I made about Disability in Science fiction.

Note: Don't take my word for any of this! I'm still figuring this stuff out. Corrections and other input very much welcome!

I've reached a point where I Just Can't Think About It Any More, I may edit again later. Make sure to check to out the comments for other people's additions.

The fantasy examples are very much tacked on, I'm sure there's fantasy specific tropes I'm missing, plus links to the relevant Disability Tropes. Mental illness and cognitive impairments are underrepresented too.
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This keeps coming up in speculative fiction and it bugs me. I'm not a historian, and I know it's wrong (and the more history I learn, the more obviously wrong it becomes). If there's some actual historian debunking this narrative somewhere I can link to I would be very grateful!

EDIT: So apparently this was named and described in 1931: Whig history. And yet people still use it! (Well, that isn't exactly what I'm talking about. But it's certainly close)
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EDIT: The more I think about this the more I worry it's derailing :( I shall leave it unlocked, of only so I can link to it the next time I am annoyed by a boundary policing straight person. But still, apologies.

So, I think homophobia and heterosexism are bad. I'm against any sort of oppression on principle, but I've also seen the terrible hurt these prejudices can cause, both in the wider world and to my LGBTQ friends in particular.

But without meaning to minimise or distract from that (because it is definitely more important), I was recently struck by the way in which a particular form of heterosexism hurts me as a straight woman as well.

Namely, the way that the impossible bind bisexual women are put into (any interest in the same sex-> lesbian! Any interest in the opposite sex-> straight!) also, in a less extreme way, erases the sexuality of those of us who have some same sex attraction but still identify as straight.

Thus, my rambling somewhat self-centered thoughts. This is definitely not a complete analysis of bi erasure! And the primary target of my ire here is boundary policing from straight people (including the little boundary policing straight person in my head), since I feel skeevy lecturing LGBT people about how they should be more inclusive of me. Only talking about women since that's where I've seen it play out, but a lot of this applies to men too¹.

PLEASE let me know if I'm being a straightsplaining jerk, and I apologise in advance if I am. I really hope not, but it's a complicated topic.

EDIT: And I am! Am in the process of editing based on people's criticisms, see the comments.

This is the conversation which inspired this post (and expresses pretty much everything I want to say much more succinctly :)), but is definitely not the first time I've encountered these ideas.
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There's been a bunch of discussion about the portrayal of gay men in m/m slash and published m/m romance recently, and despite this being a fight that doesn't involve me and I shouldn't derail I keep finding myself wanting to rant about side issues, and eventually I decided I needed to get some stuff of my chest to avoid
derailing other people's conversations.

EDIT: This post is not about issues with the way slash or published m/m fiction portray gay men. I think those issues are real, and worth addressing, and I really don't mean to minimise this important question. I'm not talking about it because I'm not a gay man or a writer of m/m fiction, so it's not my question to answer. All the stuff in this post is side issues that have been coming up in the conversation around the question of representations of gay men in m/m, and I decided to needed to get them out of my head so I didn't derail the much more important conversations other people are having. In retrospect..probably should have been a locked post.

I hope I'm not being derailing or appropriative in this post, and am going to try to be open to criticism on that score. Not screening comments anymore because the conversation is moving too fast and noone is saying anything problematic (touch wood).
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